Of
all the many recent recording projects
dedicated to unearthing and collecting
together an area of a composer's output,
there was one which particularly caught
my eye - Daniel Smith's six volume ASV
recordings of Vivaldi's complete 37 bassoon
concertos. ( see also this month's Classical
Reviews). When I met Daniel at his London
home I began by asking him whether, having
recorded the complete cycle, he felt there
was any justification in the old quip
that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto six
hundred times.

"No,
I don't think that's remotely fair. Along
the way I have performed many of these
concertos with orchestras both in public
and in the recording studio. I've come
across some pretty hard-nosed musicians
who have been in the business many years
- players, conductors and people who prefer
to just listen, and nearly all of them
were won over by the quality of Vivaldi's
inspiration.

"When
I was recording and performing concerts
with the Zagreb Soloists, one could see
the players' faces light up as they read
the music for the first time. They would
exclaim 'this is fantastic' or 'how wonderful'
as they were rehearsing! Also a friend
of mine (a conductor in Baltimore, USA)
who had made it very clear that he'd never
been very keen on Vivaldi- 'Sewing machine
music', as he would call it - did some
concertos with me both in public and also
on national radio, after which he simply
couldn't get enough of them!

"For
me personally, everything is so very distinctive,
and the character of each movement is
radically different; it's amazing what
Vivaldi was able to do within such an
apparently limited structural framework.
The concertos are, however, very difficult,
and don't let anyone say otherwise! Just
when you think you have got over all the
problems there's always a new passage
waiting around the corner to trip you
up. However as a good jazz player would
point out, you have to work your way through
all the technical problems to reach a
point where you are almost on 'automatic
pilot'. The worry concerning certain passages
doesn't go away, you simply find (usually)
that the fingers will take over and get
you through!

"For
example, in RV 478, there is a bit in
the third movement where the bassoon double-tongues
very fast on a downward scale. When we
had finished this particular take at the
recording session on-stage at Zagreb's
Lisinski Palace, the producer asked me
to take a break and come and listen to
it. He played this run over the speakers
and I was simply astounded - 'I played
that?'. It sounded like something at the
wrong or double speed, but I was in fact
being faithful to Vivaldi's intentions
and I believe I captured the right spirit.

"There
are a number of other problems here in
regard to these concertos. Number one
- how could anyone have played that music
on a primitive bassoon? When you see and
play those old Baroque bassoons with few
metal keys, just the basic shape with
a minimum of rods and keys, I really can't
imagine how all those special effects
were achieved. Secondly - who in the world
did he write them for and why did he write
so many bassoon concertos? He performed
much of this music in Venice at 'La Pieta'
a school for orphaned girls where he was
employed to teach-these young girls were
the members of the orchestra and one of
them no doubt was the bassoon soloist
and perhaps inspiration for this music!
But nobody really knows. If somebody wanted
a subject for a University thesis, they
could spend a lot of time trying to research
this one!

"Thirdly,
those other movement tempi! Just exactly
how fast would Vivaldi have taken these
at that time? The first two volumes of
the bassoon concertos which I recorded
with the English Chamber Orchestra contain
pieces that I hand-picked to start the
series - no one had ever recorded them
before. I may have had a rough idea in
my head of the tempi, but in the event,
we had to feel our way until things fell
coherently into place. There simply was
no prototype on which to base our assumptions!

"By
the time we got to final volumes, things
were getting a little easier, but the
usual studio pressures remained. I am
sure that most people (and many musicians)
are not aware of the kinds of pressures
we artists regularly record under. We
taped the final volume of seven concertos
in just two days- four complete concertos
one day and three the next, starting at
10AM and going until seven or eight at
night. You can imagine the sheer energy
and stamina required just to keep going
- black coffee to keep you awake because
you have to record things over and over
again and all the while thinking and listening
so acutely. Then a critic will come along
later and make a big fuss about some demisemiquaver
in measure 47 not being quite perfectly
articulated!

"The
pressure on the producer was every bit
as great, because he was at the helm down
in the control booth with the full knowledge
that he had to get all the music in the
'can' come what may, because after that
everyone inevitably had somewhere else
to go! Recording in this way also has
its advantages, I guess, because there's
not a lot of time to fix problems, you've
got to get it right the first or second
times, which certainly helps the spontaneity!"